But the people of the tribe understood that some things can be true and not true at once, and that a story is a thread that can be woven into the world, until it is as solid as a carpet beneath one's feet. And so they guarded the feather and the story that went with it, and passed them both down through the generations. (p. 22)

Stories that always began with the old Persian refrain "Yeki bood, yeki nabood, " I never learned much Farsi, but I did learn what those words meant.

Once was, once wasn't. (p. 77)

For a few seconds, I'd been in its skin. I'd felt the weight and wisdom of millions of years. It was older than anything. Its thoughts were thick with memories, a forest that stretched unbroken all the way back to the beginning of time. It was pure, raw, wild, and it didn't belong to anyone. If anything, it belonged to the earth, to the moonlight and the hundred ice ages it had survived.

If anything, we belonged to it. (p. 220)

Malloryn lit candles around the house and turned off the lights so that we could feel a bit more of the darkness of this darkest of nights. We took turns reading poems about winter - "The Shortest Day" by Susan Cooper, "To Know the Dark" by Wendell Berry, "Spellbound" by Emily Bronte. By candlelight, and by the sounds of our voices in the aquiet house, the world seemed much older. The words made the night deeper, the cider warmer, the persimmons sweeter, the air outside colder. (p. 277)